Forum: The Radical Legacy of MLK and the Poor People’s Campaign

Liberation Forum: The Radical Legacy of MLK and the Poor People’s Campaign!

Join us to hear from Claudia de la Cruz, an organizer with the new Poor People’s Campaign, who will speak about Dr. King’s often overlooked radical legacy and the need for a revived movement to challenge the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism.

Monday January 15th commemorates Dr. King, but the legendary civil rights organizer’s final years in the anti-war and working-class movements are often omitted. Before his assassination in 1968, King had been working on one of his biggest organizing endeavors – the Poor People’s campaign. The campaign had the goal of building a multiracial movement of working class and poor folks to challenge oppressive economic policies through his famed tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Now 50 years after the inception of the Poor People’s Campaign, grassroots organizers from across the country are working to revive that crusade.

The Struggle in Brazil

On January 24th, Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva is scheduled for a second trial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is appealing a conviction for corruption charges that hundreds of judges have publicly acknowledged to be fallacious and without a shred of evidence.

The trial, led by Judge Sérgio Moro, is part of an effort to destroy Lula’s chance of running for president again and he is currently the front runner in polls for the October 2018 presidential election. Brazilians have hit the streets to demand that his sentence be dismissed, as part of a bigger wave of resistance that has sprung up since the democratically-elected president Dilma Rousseff was ousted in a US-backed soft coup back in August 2016.

She was replaced by the US-backed Michel Temer, who’s disastrous anti-worker, anti-women and anti- LGBTQ policies have brought about mass resistance in the streets. Temer is working to scale back many of the progressive reforms brought by Rousseff and her predecessor, Lula.

Come hear about the struggle in Brazil and how we can support this fight from the belly of the beast here in NYC.